Weekly Update - 7/19/23

News flash: It's fucking hot.

That should come as a shock to no one. But I'll manage, just with fans running at full, doing what I can to stay cool.

The reaction to moving all commissioned content to follow the pattern for how I'm doing the Blake Conrad stuff, where it'll be out for Tier 3 and up a month before it's available to all subscribers and seven months before they go the general public. So if you saw the new chapter of A Pack Of His Own marked (Alpha), know that you'll get it (probably with a few minor tweaks and revisions) next month. 

The level 4+s chose for CARP to be their first of two stories voted on for this month, so I just dropped that earlier today. That story in particular is a lot of fun, because we're brushing up against the darker aspects of it now, and it's only going to get darker. Currently it looks like Before The Storm is the other one likely to get a chapter this month, but still a little time left to vote! What with QT2 getting its second chapter so early, it won't see another one until August. That means I get to decide for myself what to do for next Tuesday. Hmmm. Have to think about that one.

I'm spinning up on this month's commissions, so expect to see more of the alphas dropping over the next week or so (QT:AA, DD), in addition to Breakpoint which is currently on the agenda for Friday or Saturday. 

I went and saw Mission: Impossible during one of the heat spells and I genuinely enjoyed it, although I'm bummed out that they apparently weren't finished with making the second part of it before the SAG strike kicked in? Oh well. Patience is a good thing. I'll wait as long as it takes to get living wages for both actors and writers. Go figure.

Honestly, reading reviews of Secret Invasion has just made me mad, because I'm enjoying what I'm watching, and think it's a good-to-great usage of spy drama mixed with Marvel Mythos, but reading the reviews, I think every reviewer wanted a Marvel Movie and not A Spy Drama, and keeps on insulting the show for not being what they wanted it to be, instead of engaging with the material on its own merits. Nearly every review I've read has been like "it's all too subtle! tell me, don't show me!" and I simply can't be bothered. There's also been a lot of "how could Fury do these things?" and I'm like... "Do you really not know who Fury is as a character?" It reminded me of a point in comic books in a very famous storyline of DC's Justice League (by Mark Waid/Howard Porter) called Tower of Babel in which a bad guy steals Batman's contingency plans on how to disarm the Justice League and uses those plans against them. People were like, "Why would Batman have a plan to deal with his friends?" and I found myself going, "Have you READ comic books? Mind control, brain washing, alternate universe versions - I'm nowhere near as smart as Batman and I rattled off three reasons without even trying!" Yes, Nick Fury's done some questionable things, but they're absolutely in line with his character...

By contrast, I went on a pretty long tirade to a couple of my friends about the ending of The Blacklist, which basically took an opportunity to stick their landing well and just failed miserably by not going the extra few yards. That show had operated on ten years of trusting that at the end, we were going to get a conclusion and an answer to two key questions: Who was Raymond Reddington and why was he doing all of this? Now, the show threw out endless amounts of theories, but never confirmed any of them, and frankly, without some sort of confirmation, it all feels like they didn't have an answer. The idea of unfinished mysteries adding to the charm of shows is often a false one -- audiences want resolution. Yes yes, you can leave some stuff unanswered, but this was the core undercurrent of the show we're talking about. I think the show wanted to go up to the line of saying that Raymond Reddington was, in fact, a transitioned Katarina Rostova, without saying it, and in doing so, it all falls apart. The show's lack of a coda makes things even worse, because in that coda, so many other things could have been answered and resolved and given some sense of closure. I don't have a problem with where their ending was going, I have a problem with where it ended. The better part of the season had been dedicated to Red dismantling his empire, hinting that he was terminally ill. Take the goddamn five minutes at the end of the show to put the cards on the table and satisfy the audience that's been with you on this long journey. Even a bad answer is better than no answer at all.

Sorry, sometimes the critic in me comes back out. I'm off to my weekly poker game (it's low stakes, so stop thinking what you're thinking), but let me just lay out the public releases for the next month: Planned public releases are as follows: 7/22 - A Pack Of His Own 2, 7/29 - QT2:3, 8/5 - QT2:4, 8/12 - MG 15, 8/19 - Silversmith 3.

People keep asking me if I'm bummed out by the lack of new television because of the strike. I keep answering that I'm finally getting a chance to go back and watch some shows I missed the first time around. People keep asking my thoughts on Peaky Blinders, so maybe that'll be early on in the queue... and the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion drops in a few months, and when that hits, god help me, I won't be doing much else... Maybe I write something cyberpunk-ish... would folks be interested in that? Something to consider...